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For a long time, I have been interested in belonging: in how we are forced but also need to belong in communities, in how collective identifications form our subjective identities, in how belonging is the subject-matter of our very sense of self. I have also been interested in un-belonging, in what happens to us when we are refused or choose to refuse a collective affiliation, in the dynamic of alienation, betrayal and freedom that ensues. The paper delves into these themes by journeying through the landscape of my own difficult belonging in the land where I was born: Israel-Palestine, sunk these days in a state of catastrophic war; my experience of belonging as it is being negotiated in my own analysis, carried over the phone between Tel Aviv and New York. It is a personal-theoretical postcard from a place of existential crisis but also hope. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychoanalysis has the capacity to explain how and why people join together and against each other. If we understand identity and identification, if we understand belonging, we might be able to see how we could free ourselves from the visceral forces that pull us into mad, warring factions, making us destroy each other when we could be neighbors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this brief introduction to the collection of essays that follows, I point to what in my mind are some of the most pertinent and powerful aspects of Jessica Benjamin's The Bonds of Love (1988), the author and book to whom this collection is dedicated. I tell of my first encounter with Jessica Benjamin and the impact the encounter had on me. I comment briefly on the book's place in contemporary psychoanalysis. Using Jessica Benjamin's own words, I highlight what in my mind is one of the book's greatest achievements: the reframing of the relations between knowledge and ethics in the light of a feminist critique of gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]